Do you love your country ?

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Naava
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Re: Do you love your country ?

Postby Naava » 2018-08-26, 7:57

md0 wrote:Does any of us know where our ancestors were 400 years ago? :hmm:
Personally, I would feel that 3 generations in a place is as good as having been there forever.

I do. My family has lived in Southern Ostrobothnia since the 1600s.

Dad's interested in family history and he has all the names and everything, including the cause of death (which was cool because most of them had died of 'fever').

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Re: Do you love your country ?

Postby md0 » 2018-08-26, 8:38

Meanwhile I don't even know the names of my great-grandparents nor I ever bothered to ask and find out :hmm:
Is this kind of family history a niche hobby or is my family the weird one out?
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Naava
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Re: Do you love your country ?

Postby Naava » 2018-08-26, 9:02

I think family history is somewhat popular here. Not everyone is interested, but it's not rare either. It's quite easy, too, because the priests and pastors and such have been very dutiful in writing down the names of christened babies and dead members of the church. As long as there hasn't been fires or bombings, you should be able to find names going back for several generations without too much difficulty.

I know the names of my great-grandparents because I've visited their graves (my grandparents were buried in the same grave) and because I've heard some stories of them. I think that's quite common especially in countryside, because nobody moved further than the next village before the 19th-20th centuries. Even my father's childhood home is about 200 years old and the same family used to live there ever since it was built... Sadly, it's not safe anymore so no one has lived there since my grandmother left the place almost twenty years ago.

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Re: Do you love your country ?

Postby Lur » 2018-08-26, 11:51

I only know up to my grandparents and I'm basically uninterested in more. Also at that point I'm down to three fascists out of four people so who the hell cares. (This is why I'm weirded out when people talk about "ancestors" and "heritage", like I'd prefer choosing things myself thank you very much)

Aurinĭa wrote:
KatyP wrote:We're still growing and maturing. (...) We're young compared to a lot of other countries and still figuring things out.

But the US is not a young country, is it? The US declared itself independent in 1776, which is almost 250 years ago. The Civil War ended in 1865, and in the more than 150 years since then there have been no major wars in the continental US that had a severe impact on the state structure and/or necessitated the rebuilding of a lot of the infrastructure of the country.

The US is not young in the absolute sense, nor in the relative sense compared to many other countries.

I always say that Spain is younger than the US wether you count at the creation of the Kingdom of Spain or the 1978 Constitution.

And that's in the assimilationist perspective. In the non-assimilationist perspective... well... while not the same for all peoples at all, it's still a lot more.
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Re: Do you love your country ?

Postby Aurinĭa » 2018-08-26, 14:49

md0 wrote:Personally, I would feel that 3 generations in a place is as good as having been there forever.

I'd say four generations, meaning your great-grandparents immigrated to the country you live in (or grandparents as very young children, before they were able to form proper long-term memories of their country of origin), because then you don't have ancestors who can tell you about that place.

md0 wrote:Meanwhile I don't even know the names of my great-grandparents nor I ever bothered to ask and find out :hmm:
Is this kind of family history a niche hobby or is my family the weird one out?

I know the names of the two great-grandparents I can remember (even though for one of them those memories are mainly of her in a hospital bed), and of the grandparent who died before I was born. I know one of my great-great-(great?)-grandparents was a foundling, and her name as well. (I also don't know or care about any second cousins and the like).

Lur wrote:I always say that Spain is younger than the US wether you count at the creation of the Kingdom of Spain or the 1978 Constitution.

And that's in the assimilationist perspective. In the non-assimilationist perspective... well... while not the same for all peoples at all, it's still a lot more.

Exactly. I was also thinking of all those ex-colonies, ex-Soviet states, etc. that became independent during the twentieth century.

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Re: Do you love your country ?

Postby JackFrost » 2018-08-26, 15:42

md0 wrote:Does any of us know where our ancestors were 400 years ago? :hmm:
Personally, I would feel that 3 generations in a place is as good as having been there forever.

I certainly do. 400 years ago, that would be around 1620. So, my English and French ancestors were about to settle in Massachusetts and New France. The German ones were still in central western Germany for another century. The Slovak, Scots, Welsh, and Irish hung around at home for between two to three more centuries.

My tree goes back to the ancient times, actually. It's pretty easy to go back that far when you're connected to members of the nobility who were descended from a medieval English king. It all depends how great a given country is at keeping records, especially churches.
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Re: Do you love your country ?

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-08-26, 16:04

The Portuguese burned our church records about 500 years ago (which also included genealogical information that seems impossible to find otherwise), but even then, I'm fairly certain that my dad's family at the time was here and my mom's family was within 50 km of that.

And even if I was completely wrong about that, to what extent is any single individual's genealogy relevant to the makeup of the population overall? What are the odds of mass resettlement within the last 400 years?

Also, three or four generations is certainly not forever in an American context. There is a clear and important difference between people who have been here for a few hundred years and people who have been here for tens of thousands of years.

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Re: Do you love your country ?

Postby Gormur » 2020-07-16, 18:52

I have a different answer. You might know about the tradition of going out in the country to find yourself. It could be with others or by yourself. This might be more of a Northern tradition. I like to walk a lot, but I think this practice expresses a type of patriotism

Going out to observe nature is patriotic because you're exploring the country and learning about yourself, very peacefully. I think it's good :)

As to other things related to a country I don't appreciate politics much. I'll observe things up to a certain point. When it comes to arguments I kind of tune out because I think it's taking away from what matters to me

A country needs functionality to be a country. That's all that I recognize. I wouldn't however consider myself to be patriotic towards any country except Norway because I think it's important to know who you are and for me it's where I come from, my family and history

The United States is like a political map in my head that I have no feelings towards and barely anything interesting ever happens to me for me to say that I like it. I do recognize survival as being important though and so far I haven't suffered very much, which is a good thing

I'm sort of against flags but I have a Norwegian flag although I think the American flag is ugly. Once somebody put one on my lawn as a kid and I burned it. I never saw one again after that
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Re: Do you love your country ?

Postby liljorna » 2020-07-22, 19:22

i do not "love" my country. i am not sure that it is possible for me to really "love" any country. you can find good things and bad things anywhere. and a country is made up of too many different parts (nature, landscape, weather, infrastructure, culture(s), society, politics, economy...) to love or hate all of them.

being german, i was brought up in a very non-patriotic environment. i would even say patriotism was a kind of taboo (due to our country's history), at least until 2006, when germany hosted the world cup and people suddenly started putting up flags (something i'd never seen here before in public!) and painting their faces in the colors of the german flag. that's when things started to change a bit. nowadays it's far more common to hear german people say they're proud of their country.

i am not proud of being german, firstly because it is not an achievement to be proud of, i just happened to be born here, and secondly because i don't feel superior to anyone else just because of my nationality. rather than feeling "german" i was raised as a european, with the feeling of being part of something bigger, united with different cultures and languages, which i've always had a great interest in.

i think germany is (still) a very good country to live in. it's relatively safe, relatively democratic, relatively well run, with a relatively high standard of living. but it might not be like this forever... who knows. the current developments (not only in germany but in many countries, unfortunately) aren't very promising.
and i often feel like the values that some germans are still so proud of (honesty, diligence, order, reliability, accuracy, discipline, prudence, tolerance...) are disappearing, which is sad.

i've also lived in italy, and as much as i miss it when i am not there, there also are a lot of things i don't like and that would drive me crazy if i lived there again.

i guess it would be nice to have several places to live, in different countries, and move every few months, so you can enjoy the nice things a country has to offer, and leave before the negative aspects make you too depressed. :P
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Re: Do you love your country ?

Postby Yasna » 2020-07-22, 20:24

No. Good thing too, because it's doubtful that it will still exist in a recognizable form in 10 to 20 years.
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